It takes me a while to recognise Anne Wood. We last met almost 12 years ago when her hair was cerise and white, and she charged around the brightly coloured production studios of Ragdoll, the children’s TV company she started in 1984 using the family home as collateral. I was heavily pregnant then and, to date, she’s the only interviewee who has ever asked if I needed the loo.
This time around I scan the high-ceilinged lounge at the Piccadilly headquarters of Bafta, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, where I have arranged to meet Wood with her son Chris, who now runs Ragdoll. It was here also that she received a special award 24 years ago for outstanding contribution to children’s TV and film.
I squint at a duo seated at a small round table. The man is wearing round tortoise-shell spectacles, navy jumper and chinos, but the dynamic looks wrong. She is too subdued, listening rather than holding forth, in an outfit of muted greys and mauves, snowy hair flecked with ginger in the fringe. Not at all as I remembered. Then she starts talking, and he sits back. It is her after all.
Over four decades, Wood’s name became synonymous with children’s television. The creator of Teletubbies and In the Night Garden. . . has a special talent for keying into infantile feelings. Top of her mind is always to ask, “If I was a child today, how would I feel?” She doesn’t want to broadcast it but her age (86) is announced in newspapers on her birthday every year. For those with long careers, it can be painful to experience ructions in an industry they once dominated. The company is a shadow of what it was in its heyday more than two decades ago. Back then it had 30 full-time employees and a large site in the West Midlands. Now it’s just two or three staff at any one time with a network of freelancers depending on the workload. Its most recent work was B.O.T. and the Beasties (2021), shown on the BBC’s CBeebies channel.
In 2013, conscious that lean times were coming, Anne and Chris sold Ragdoll Worldwide, a joint venture with BBC Worldwide, to DHX Media, including the series Dipdap and Brum, as well as In the Night Garden. . . and Teletubbies, for £17.4mn. Those creations are now out in the world doing their own thing. Wood had no input on the new Netflix Teletubbies reboot. She won’t watch it and says she won’t discuss it, wanting to focus on new work. If The Rolling Stones can release fresh material, I think, so can Wood.
Her latest idea revolves around the crushing experience of losing a toy. It came a couple of years ago when Wood saw a flyer featuring a stuffed rabbit, warped from companionship, posted on trees and fences by parents hoping for its return. The memory sat in her mind, her unconscious chipping away at it until she had an idea. Heartbreak. That is what Wood wanted to convey. She remembers that acute, childish pain well. Describing it now, she pouts and puckers, her face contorted in agony. Her voice is soft, hard to hear over the other film and TV people doing business. But, for a moment, it doesn’t matter. Scrunched-up light-blue eyes and mouth are doing all the work. What a comfort it would be for children to think that a lost toy is not wretched, lying sodden, face down in some park, but instead off having adventures. That became the basis for her new project: a show for pre-school children titled Little Lost Tubby and Friends.
As I listen, I realise I’d assumed I was coming to talk to Wood about a project about to go live. But this is still only a pitch. The greatest challenge in getting it off the ground has been financial, she explains. The Woods showed Little Lost Tubby to the BBC, which “loved it” but will not cover the entire cost. “We have to raise more money,” she says. The show is expensive because it will use a composite of stop-frame animation and live action. Wood puts out her fingers, showing manicured grey nails, and squeezes the air. “If we used line animation it wouldn’t mean as much.” Tactility is important.
Talking to Wood is a reminder that it takes just as much confidence and rigour to make children’s programmes as those for adults. One of the hardest lessons she has taught her son is simplicity. Adults tend to overcomplicate things, and double down once they’ve got themselves into a mess. Kids need absolute clarity. It’s instinctive with Wood. She once manhandled a cameraman because she wanted him to hold the shot to allow the child to process what they were seeing. As with other narrative forms, the fundamental question is: why should you care? “Ideas are very fragile at the beginning,” Chris says.
It’s hard to compete with YouTube and streamers, as funding in the UK for public service broadcasting for young children has declined. Wood can’t understand why more people aren’t angry. “If somebody said there would be no more books written for children in this country, there would be outrage.” They are creating another simpler (cheaper) programme to keep going. “The market has failed. It’s desperate times,” she says.
Chris was in theatre production before he joined the company. “I did not want him to come,” Anne says. “My heart sank. I thought the hardest thing for him would [be] the frustration.” Today she radiates gratitude that he did, because the prospect of retirement had always filled her with dread. “The realities of the business have got worse. I couldn’t possibly deal with the landscape now. You need to be younger.” Handing over allowed her to become Ragdoll’s creative director. It’s a part-time role, though she’s never not working: gestating ideas, emailing notes on scripts, mulling.
The very idea of TV for such young age groups is still controversial. The charge is that the screen becomes a sort of electronic babysitter numbing infants’ minds. Wood, a former teacher, has put forward the counterargument many times: it is educational, reinforcing language and concepts through play.
How can she still find this age group so creatively compelling after all these years? She winces, worried she’s in danger of coming over sentimental, like a modern William Blake, the 18th-century poet and painter who saw children as paragons of innocence. But it’s true. “Parents are hard up, pushed for time,” she says, while to a child’s eyes “the world is wonderful”.
To this day, she still gets emails from adults asking about Rosie and Jim, which was last made in 2000. Nostalgia has long been a feature of Wood’s life, and she may want to look to the future but loves talking about her greatest hits. Before I go, I try to find her a TikTok post of four teens in a supermarket holding toys of In the Night Garden. . . characters and dancing to its soothing music.
It buffers on my phone and I give up. Later, at home, I watch it by myself. It strikes me that over the golden era of television when prestige dramas have been compared with Shakespeare (The Sopranos) or Dickens (The Wire), Wood has been preoccupied with an audience who don’t know Hamlet from Pip. But the thought and creativity that go into her shows are nonetheless extraordinary, and that partly explains her viewers’ devotion. Put a cuddly Igglepiggle in front of them, and they would clutch the blue toy with its red cape close to their heart.
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